Terry Eagleton quotes - page 2

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present. (Terry Eagleton)
The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. View quote
Terry Eagleton
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. View quote
Terry Eagleton
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author. View quote
Terry Eagleton
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs. View quote
Terry Eagleton
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal. (Terry Eagleton)
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. View quote
Terry Eagleton
I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U. S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller. View quote
Terry Eagleton
It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged”, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration. View quote
Terry Eagleton
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning. View quote
Terry Eagleton
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. View quote
Terry Eagleton
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does. View quote
Terry Eagleton
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself. View quote
Terry Eagleton
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons-reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for. View quote
Terry Eagleton
In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34. View quote
Terry Eagleton
As opposed to science ideology has the precise function of hiding the real contradictions and of reconstituting on an imaginary level a relatively coherent discourse which serves as the horizon of agents' experience. (Terry Eagleton)
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. View quote
Terry Eagleton
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob. View quote
Terry Eagleton